No, Senator Sherrod Brown Government Does Not Create Jobs

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post writes;

It’s good to see the two presidential campaigns squaring off over the real causes of the ongoing unemployment crisis, but let’s face it: When it comes to whether we are actually going to do anything to create jobs, we’re stuck in a holding pattern — even as the jobs numbers continue to show the recovery is sputtering.

Is there anything Obama and Democrats can do to change this? I put the question to Senator Sherrod Brown. He suggested that the President and Dems need to get behind a strong message about government’s very real role in creating jobs — and to use that message to pressure Republicans for legislative action immediately.

“Everybody knows that government creates jobs,” Brown said, citing the highway bill that has passed the Senate but is bottled up in the GOP-controlled House, which Dems say would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

It's small wonder people have lost faith in government with people like Brown pretending to understand elementary economics. How would a government create a job? The government has no money of its own. To build a highway the government must expropriate by taxation the money to hire the contractors who employs the workers. If it does not have the money it must borrow it. When the government spends at a deficit aside from placing a burden on future generations it also lessens its ability to spend in the future. No, Sherrod Brown one can't have one's cake and eat it too. In either case the money spent by the government is money that is not available to the private sector. Politicians like Obama and Brown can mug for the camera's at ribbon cutting ceremonies but for every mile of concrete poured there are hundreds of jobs that are not created in the private sector. Perhaps Brown should ask his fellow Senator Dick Blumenthal how a job is created. Blumenthal stammered through two minutes of inane drivel with a deer in the headlights gaze on his bony face. Linda McMahon answered the question precisely and concisely in about 15 seconds.

 

“Government, government, government. Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how you create jobs. An entrepreneur takes risk. He or she believes that they create or good or service that is sold for more than it costs to create it. If an entrepreneur thinks he can do that he creates a job.”